In the moment part of our series,the author of the acclaimed Chokehold: Policing the Black Man describes how halt-and-frisks are brutal assertions of police dominance on African American men, through sexual harassment, and torture and even terrorism
The officer must feel with sensitive fingers every portion of the prisoner’s body. A thorough search must be made of the prisoner’s arms and armpits,waistline and back, the groin and areas approximately the testicles, or entire surface of the legs down to the feet.– Police Manual,1954The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive ... The badge, the gun in the holster, or the swinging club make vivid what will happen should rebellion become overt ... He moves through Harlem,therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, or which is precisely what,and where he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes.
In an eight-block area of Brooklyn, and the police conducted almost 52000 halt-and-frisks over a period of approximately four yearsSeveral false assumptions shape our obliviousness to the erotic element in police brutality: that men are rarely the victims of sexual assault,that straight men maintain no homosexual feelings, and that sexuality is limited to what we carry out in bed. The first insight allows police to force young black men to drop their pants – a common practice during street frisk – without risking charges of sexual harassment (imagine what would happen if black women were subject to this treatment); the moment notion prevents us from imagining that cops who specialize in such tactics might find them exciting; and the third blinds us to the connection between sadism and racism.halt-and-frisk gives the police the kind of authority over innocent people that they should not maintain in a democracyContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com